Communing with the dead: reflections from a landlocked sailor

Port Townsend, Washington, 14 December 2021 – It’s only been three months since we left Caro Babbo at Northern Enterprises in Homer, Alaska. They have been a long three months.

In those months, Jennifer and I flew from Homer directly to Berlin, Germany; I sailed a boat from Port Angeles to Oakland; I worked on my house in Atlanta and hosted a dinner for six; I made a new friend or two and collated and scanned the first of the dozen or two boxes of papers and photographs from my parents’ house.

The first box contained more than 1000 photographs, the majority from the 1920s through the 1940s. Until we get into the 1950s, everyone in any of those photographs has passed; I knew almost every one of those people. By the time we get to the 1950s and 60s my cousins and I are being born. For the most part, we are now older than that aged population whose lives I see progress through the decades of photographs as the pictures enter the 60s.

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